Flights are cancelled for the next days, and my parents, myself and everyone else here visiting for the holidays is stuck in Vermont.

And? My nephews—Leo (7), Huck (4), and Roy (2)— certainly don’t mind the blizzard. They dwell blissfully in the now, sledding down the hill toward the freezing creek and playing with legos by the wood burning stove. No TV for distraction here, just old-fashioned play and books and simple toys. Oh, and Another Culture.

As I travel the country, a number of people have been asking me: What’s the Leisure Ethic?

Working 24/7… 24 hours a week; 7 months a year

While living in a 12’ x 12’, off-grid house, I noticed people reclaiming the right to be idle! They are ratcheting down from overdeveloped to developed, from too much to enough. Dr. Jackie expressed it to me once like this: part of the joy of simplifying one’s material life is that you don’t have to work long hours to buy and maintain a bunch of stuff. This leaves time for open-ended chats — like the kind I began to have in North Carolina. Doing nothing is a carbon neutral activity!

I receive so many letters from readers about Twelve by Twelve. Thank you for your feedback! Connecting soul-to-soul with you makes the three years I spent writing it seem entirely worth it. Here’s part of one very thoughtful note I received yesterday. It’s from John Reed, author of the book Elegant Simplicity. He said it was fine to share it. Thanks John.

It has been an amazing trip to the Twin Cities, a welcoming community of people deeply interested in the issues in Twelve by Twelve. I’ve given six talks here in six days: at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute, Common Good Books, the Unitarian Unity Church, a fundraiser for Round Earth Media, and a sustainable development class and the EnviroThursday lecture at Macalester College.

I am learning a lot from each group about other initiatives going on in these communities – and it is in turn inspiring me to see how our fellow Americans are working in their own ways, in a sense fulfilling their own 12×12 visions, as we speak.

This fascinating NY Times article show that scientists claim that “juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. Our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.”

Further: “These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.”

Have you experienced this? Does the distraction of too much technology inflict nicks and cuts on your creative edge and sense of peace? Or do you simply see Facebook, Twitter, texting, calling—and, yes, blogging—as simply another tool that enhances your effectiveness, while still staying focused on what matters?

In 1996, while teaching at Santa Fe Indian School, my Native American students told me their story of Jesus: Jesus, they told me, continues to fight an ongoing battle with Murosuyo, a Native American god. They duke it out in the sky and on the ground. The stakes are the fate of the earth. Just as Jesus seems to deliver the final death blow, Murosuyo tackles him in the heavens, and they fall together through the clouds and into a lake, and so it continues. I found it fascinating that their culture and environment is still hanging on today through Murosuyo’s efforts. My teaching became an exchange of ideas.

Stan writes in A Garlic Testament about “the pound weight of the real,” the actual wrinkled dollars that are exchanged over a box of organic garlic at a farmers market. I’d weigh a pound, hand that weight to a customer, and accept the greenbacks that would pay my wage and Stan and Rose Mary’s farm expenses. They were constantly “snatching from the cash flow,” as Stan put it, living without savings right on the edge of subsistence like most of humanity. Yet that’s exactly what bound them with others. A kind of barter system existed in the area — I shear your sheep, you midwife for me — as well as a traditional communal relationship over irrigation that centered around maintaining tiny dirt canals called acequias. This wasn’t just pragmatism; I sensed a real passion and spirit that comes from subsistence. I saw it again all over the Global South, where living along the contours of enough, without much surplus, keeps you on your entrepreneurial toes and linked to others through reciprocity.

Russia, crippled by intense drought that has withered millions of acres of Russian wheat, moved today to ban exports of its grain. This is a fifth of the world’s market, and comes at a time when grain prices are already up 90%.

This dangerous mix of global warming (this is Russia’s worst heat wave since record-keeping started there 130 years back), the precariousness of chemical-industrial agriculture, and the fickleness of world trade flows got me thinking, once again: Is there a better way?

Have you ever monitored your Twitter feed while you were in the middle of Facebooking— only to be distracted by the ping of an incoming email? In this digital age, do you ever feel too connected?

I’m in the middle of a new book called Hamlet’s Blackberry, which seeks to teach us how to connect with wisdom. I came across it partly because the author and I share the same name. The book looks to history for precedents into how we can reduce some of our information age anxiety.